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Pluggers, 11/15/19

“What would a young one think a ‘telephone book’ is? Probably a catalog of smartphones — that is, a printed multipage document, filled with pictures and pricing information for various models of smartphones, which gets delivered to you in the mail or you pick up at a cell phone store. Once you’ve picked the smartphone you want, you’d call up the company to buy it, or maybe fill out a form from the back of the catalog and send a check along with it. I’m sure this is a real concept that kids are familiar with, and that they associate with the phrase ‘telephone book.’” –A plugger, apparently

Mary Worth, 11/15/19

Hard to know what to even say that could add to this objectively perfect strip. I guess what really makes it work is that it viscerally makes us understand what it’s like for Estelle to have a nightmare about Wilbur siring four identical Wilburbabies with her, because after seeing that second panel we’ll all be seeing those same Wilburbabies in our own nightmares tonight, and every other night until death finally takes us.

The Lockhorns, 11/15/19

“So, did you bring a dish? I said it was pot luck. You know what that means, right? A meal where people bring dishes to share? It’s a pretty standard English word.”

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Blondie, 11/4/19

I was going to say that Dagwood, who is apparently willing to stick his tongue into some sort of measuring/scanning apparatus and have the details of his mouth biology stored indefinitely in the cloud in order to prove his “loyalty” to a restaurant and get few percent knocked off his bill, represents the ultimate version of the modern human, willing to trade away his privacy for pennies. But then it occurred to me that restaurants could just do this with facial recognition, which makes me assume that this is actually just some kind of sick fetish idea on Dagwood’s part.

Mary Worth, 11/4/19

I fully expect that I’m going to be bringing you my close analysis of Wilbur’s Drunken Double Date multiple times this week. Today, as we learn that Zak does not subscribe to the cult of the grind prevalent among so many tech founders and game industry execs, we should pause and appreciate Wilbur’s facial expression in panel two, which is a pretty good illustration of a very, very drunk guy trying and almost succeeding in holding it together.

Dustin, 11/4/19

One of the core bits of Dustin lore that I already hate myself for knowing is that Dustin is a temp who gets assigned to generic white-collar office jobs from which he almost immediately gets fired because he sucks at them, but somehow his temp agency keeps finding him more work. Anyway, it’s definitely out of character for him to suddenly be given a job in the skilled trades, and I’d like to believe that it represents some narrative shift in the strip, but I’m assuming the cartoonist saw the phrase “Quick Lube” and thought, “Ha ha, you know who wouldn’t be quick at lubing things? That incompetent millennial Dustin!” We should probably be glad the strip ended up like this and not about sex stuff.

The Lockhorns, 11/4/19

My favorite thing about this strip is that Leroy has turned away from his wife and is heading into the bar while she narrates her disdain for him to some passerby. “Wife making mouth noises, but no time to process them,” he thinks. “Daylight waning, along with it opportunities for day drinking.”

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Pluggers, 10/18/19

The point of Pluggers, it seems to me, is that it’s meant to draw a distinction between pluggers and … the rest of the world, defined however you want (liberal elitists? big city folk? the young and the hip?). We might disagree on what exactly those distinctions are, on what communities the plugger community defines itself as not being, but I think we can all agree that today’s panel — “A plugger uses an extremely common slang term in an everyday situation” — is terrible, just terrible, carrying almost no semantic content to speak of. The good news: this means we’ve run out of meaningful things to say about pluggers, and can shut down this strip forever.

Dennis the Menace, 10/18/19

Wow, this is the Dennis the Menace that’s going to be haunting my nightmares! “What if he was your son, George?” asks Martha — his wife with whom, of course, he has no children — while George looks down at Dennis with a sort of detached contemplation. I have so many questions about this! Is this some weird little game they’re playing? Is Dennis already a participant in this fantasy, or do they hope he’ll catch on and play along? Why does she say “your” son instead of “our” son??? I guess the “punchline” is supposed to be turning that back on her — he’s not my son, I just married into him when I married you — but it’s such a weird way of doing it! What the hell, man? Seriously, what the hell?

The Lockhorns, 10/18/19

Honest to God, the first time I read this, I thought Leroy was talking to Loretta, and that he really had missed his trial and was going to jail soon. Which would be good, honestly! He should go to jail, for his crimes!